Monday, 12 April 2010

There are so many delicious looking fairy tale treats to feast on this week. The new issue of Goblin Fruit, the fantastical poetry zine, is up. And to celebrate their fourth birthday they're giving away lovely icons, like the one to the left, for you to peruse and use (the icons have been created by Deborah J. Brannon, using Oliver Hunter's gorgeous artwork).

The second issue of Enchanted Conversation has also gone live. It's dedicated to Beauty and the Beast and is packed with retellings, reimaginings and reviews of the tale. I can't wait to dig in!

And, if you're still not full up from all that fairy tale goodness, tomorrow night Heston's Fairytale Feast will air on Channel 4 at 9pm. The pudding sounds good: 'the guests make their way through a wooded glade to find a Hansel and Gretel house made entirely of sweets'. But I'm not so sure about some of the other recipes, which, according to the Radio Times, include 'Snow White-style apples, made from blown sugar piped full of boar mousse' and 'chicken testicles done in the style of jelly beans (with a squid-ink coating).'

Thanks all for your comments. Yes it is the real menu! I know, it sounds horrible. I probably should have put up a bit more explanation about the chef for anyone outside the UK, he's called Heston Blumenthal and he has a reputation for doing very peculiar things with food. For example here is his recipe for Chicken with Hay(!) http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database/chickeninasaltcrustw_80465.shtml

About The Fairy Tale Cupboard

I kept this blog and maintained listings of fairy tale related events, performances and exhibitions from July 2009 until January 2011, when I got the urge for a change and started blogging atGathering Scrapsinstead. I'm very grateful to all the people who read, commented and contributed to the cupboard, and I hope that if people still stumble here from time to time they find something useful to take away.

Why a cupboard?

Well, at the end of From the Beast to the Blonde (1995, Vintage), Marina Warner talks of the store of fairy tales as 'that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered'—but I can't help but imagine it as a big old cupboard—and she then says the store 'offers magical metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was found there, and to those who hear what the storyteller brings.'

The Fairy Tale Cupboard aims to be a little corner in which to gather together all the trailing odds and ends of shifting tales and their trinkets and treasure that float and dangle and sparkle across the web.

Seven

In a list of top UK Children's Literature Blogs this is number seven, which is a bit exciting, especially as seven is a recurring number in fairy tales. Click on Rackham's Ravens for the list.

Articles

Visit New Fairy Tales...

Copyright things

All images on this site are either used with permission, public domain, licensed by creative commons, or created by me. With quotes I always provide sources and, where possible, links. For the rest of the Cupboard's content please see the license below. Thanks.